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Wrath of the Orphans – Chris Philbrook

September 7, 2016 No Comments

A book that lives up to its name, Wrath of the Orphans is intense, gruesome—wrathful, even—and it stars a pair of orphans. Snark aside, It’s an intense ride. The pair endure the unthinkable: losing family, loved ones, home, and future in a single night. Truth be told, it was a bit cliché. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. I’ll admit to a bit of groaning when the first act of the story took me down such a familiar path; I was ready to be bored by the story at that point. But given that this was an audiobook (from the kind folks at Audible) and that I had many a chore to complete, I kept listening. And I’m glad I did. After the methodical destruction of their entire lives, the orphans don’t go down the path of traditional heroes. Rather, they go pretty much berserk and vote violent revenge

Shadow and Light – Catherine Goldwyn and Phil Lewis

August 21, 2016 No Comments

Longtime visitors of this blog know that alongside book commentary, I occasionally dabble in music reviews. Those reviews were heavily context-dependent; I would hear something that was really compelling, something that drove my writing forward, that settled in my brain, giving the hamster in the wheel up there enough fuel to run his little heart out. Such is the case with Shadow and Light, an excellent jazz record by the duo Catherine Goldwyn and Phil Lewis. (Full disclosure, Catherine is a dear friend, and mother to some of my closest friends on this here planet. Don’t let that relationship fool you, however. This is really a wonderful record, and would be so even if I didn’t know Catherine and Phil.) Finding music to write to can be challenging. It has to fit the tone and mood of the scene just right while remaining in the background, allowing the creative part

Falling in Love with Hominids – Nalo Hopkinson

August 2, 2016 No Comments

I’ve been fortunate, over the last year or so, to have had my horizons expanded as a reader. For a while, my bread and butter were long-form fantasy epics, or space operas dealing with political games and good-versus-evil as a central theme. Don’t get me wrong; I love those books still, and they can get plenty “deep” to satisfy any curious soul. But the more I read short fiction and speculative fiction like Nalo Hopkinson’s Falling in Love with Hominids (published by Tachyon), the more convinced I feel of the power of science fiction and fantasy to tell deeply human stories with the capacity to elicit change. The term “visionary fiction,” introduced by the editors of Octavia’s Brood, has stuck with me, and it’s appropriate that I followed up that collection with the spectacular fiction of Nalo Hopkinson. It shares many of the visionary qualities of the stories in Octavia’s

Pet Human – Nannybot A3–4

August 1, 2016 1 Comment

Pet Human, by Nannybot A3-4, has to be one of the oddest pieces I’ve read in a while. It’s an instruction manual for the caring and control of pet humans. See, it turns out that sometime later this century, we create the first functional AIs, which leads to the subsequent development of TIs, Technological Intelligences (read: not artificial), which propels technology forward at an incredible pace. Cut forward a few thousand years, and we’re in something of an odd situation. Pet Human is written for an audience across space and time, and is thus comprehensible to the likes of you and me. It’s a strangely enthralling read, for an instruction manual. Between the lines of its matter-of-fact descriptions of a post-humanist universe, wherein humanity has been improved upon, but reduced to pets, lay a magnificently built world. But there’s something more to it. While the manual has me convinced of the

Spell/Sword – G. Derek Adams

July 30, 2016 No Comments

Asteroid Made of Dragons was G. Derek Adams’s first (semi-)traditionally published work, but the man was no stranger to releasing books. As you may (or may not) recall from my review of AMoD, Adams had self-published two prequels prior to winning the Sword and Laser contest on Inkshares. The first of those books is Spell/Sword, wherein we meet the protagonist duo of Rime and Jonas and go careening through glowing canyons and flying on wyverns with them on their first adventure. Adams was kind enough to provide me with a copy of Spell/Sword in audiobook form, which is currently available on Audible, and is wonderfully narrated by Rachel Ahrens, who brings a voice and character to Rime so close to what my mind created when I read AMoD that I was a bit surprised, to be honest. She really did a fantastic job. The thing about Adams’s writing is that,

Featured Author: Rebekka S. Leber

July 12, 2016 No Comments

As one of the hosts of Drinkshares: Last Call, Rebekka Leber (Facebook, Twitter) has cemented herself as an influential member of the Inkshares community. Her book, Proxy, is available for preorder now and if what I’ve read of it is any indication, it’s going to be gritty and dark, witty with snark, and … I can’t exactly think of a third pair rhyme that works. Long story short: it’s going to be a fantastic book. Learn more about Proxy and Rebekka below. About Proxy: Max Lucas only ever worried about one thing: how she was going to score her next bottle. She’s not proud, but it’s the only thing that ever gets the voices to shut up. When a horrific murder lifts the veil on her mysterious ancestry, she finally learns the reason why she can hear the thoughts of an entire city and why she can move objects with her mind. She’s

Monkey Business – Landon Crutcher

July 10, 2016 No Comments

I enjoy a good laugh as much as the next person, but I rarely find myself seeking out books in the humor category, opting instead for more “serious fare.” I don’t know why. I loved Lamb, had an exceedingly good time with Asteroid Made of Dragons, and have a leather bound and much loved collection of Douglas Adams’s famous Hitchhiker’s Guide series. And those are off the top of my head. Point is, I probably ought to laugh more. So when I spoke to Landon Crutcher about his debut novel— the first to be published by Inkshares’s Quill imprint — I decided it was past time for me to read a book that’d make me laugh. And laugh I did. Monkey Business is just like Landon described it in our chat: a zany, shenanigans-filled Will Ferrell-style comedy on paper. I was of two minds when I initially heard that description, as

Featured Author: Kelsey Rae Barthel

July 6, 2016 No Comments

Note: at the time this interview was conducted, Beyond the Code was not yet published. The book is now available on Amazon. After an unplanned hiatus, we’re back with another featured author! Kelsey Rae Barthel’s book Beyond the Code caught my attention long before we’d been put in touch by a mutual contact. Her book will be published by Quill, Inkshares’s light-publishing imprint. Follow along with Beyond the Code on Twitter and Facebook. About Beyond the Code: As a Knight, Luna had always believed in the Knights code of honour and the Hand Council that governed them. That believe costs her dearly when Damon Lexus orders the death of Luna’s master to cover up her strong arming other Knights into her service through black mail and murder. In her search for justice for her fallen master she discovers that the Hand Council had been corrupted. That they were allowing masters like Lexus to steal

Ageless Spoilercast — Interviewing Paul Inman

June 30, 2016 No Comments

After reading and reviewing Paul Inman’s Ageless, I had the pleasurable opportunity to directly ask him several things about the novel. Our conversation meandered a bit, so I hope you’ll stick with it for its (rather lengthy) entirety. Enjoy!

Ageless – Paul Inman

June 17, 2016 1 Comment

We often try to classify writing by its elemental genre, the thing at the heart of the text that drives or emotional attachment to the story. These aren’t things like “fantasy,” “science fiction,” or “slipstream”; rather, it’s mystery, adventure, wonder, horror, relationship, and the like that connect us, on a human level, to what we read. At a first glance, Ageless seems to be a combination of mystery and wonder: we have the big “what if” of wonder— what if a person aged so slowly that they were essentially immortal?— and the puzzle-piece arrangement of our leap into the story, immediately eliciting questions of “how” that start off a mystery. But as Ageless progresses, it becomes clear that it is a character-driven story, unfolding across generations, and dealing with fundamental questions of love and loss, and the limits of human kindness and cruelty. It is a book about relationships. It’s

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